Jane Hayes – Birmingham Mail Aug 8, 2020
One of the Florence Nightingale hospitals that were set to deal with an expected throng of coronavirus patients but which have remained almost empty. Click to enlarge
The giant NHS Nightingale Hospital created at the NEC in case local hospitals were overwhelmed by coronavirus is being scaled down, we can reveal today.
The original arena location – capable of providing more than 2,000 emergency beds – is being emptied of beds and a smaller version is being created on the NEC estate.
We understand workers are currently dismantling facilities so the giant hall can be returned to the NEC.
It was never used by coronavirus patients.
NHS chiefs said the Nightingale is not closing down as an entity, saying “a smaller standby facility for capacity for up to 400 beds is being retained.”
University Hospitals Birmingham, who ran the facility, told us: “We are in the process of agreeing with the NEC that a smaller standby facility is created to support the NHS until March 2021. This provides us with the necessary provisions and allows the NEC to get back to business.”
They later added: “NHS Nightingale Hospital Birmingham is not closing down.”
A worker posted a short video earlier today on Twitter, purportedly from inside the venue, showing staff taking down bed bays. The video also scans the space and intones: “What a waste of f****** money that was, look at that, hundreds of beds.”
His comments hark back to observations made at the time of the opening, when everyone involved expressed their wish that it would ‘never be needed.’
Last month, when asked about lessons learned through the crisis, David Rosser, chief executive of University Hospitals Birmingham, said it was “now clear” that too much capacity was created in the NHS: “We can….see we created too much capacity in hospital and with the Nightingale hospital.
“But if you take that a step further and ask me would I have not done that, I would say no – that insurance policy was worth its weight in gold.
“I’m sure the public found that very reassuring that we had that obvious capacity to fall back on, and I know my teams did – the pressures of potentially having to manage patients in corridors because we had run out of beds, as other countries did, would have been a horrible situation.”
Also see:
London NHS Nightingale hospital will shut next week
Covid-19: Nightingale hospitals set to shut down after seeing few patients
The Tory government starved the NHS to bring it close to failure, after which it can be sold off cheap. But the vultures wanting to buy it don’t want a skeleton they want meat, so just before it collapses the Tories will put new public money into it, knowing that by the time the value works its way through the system it will be in private hands. I think these Nightingale hospitals are part of that enrichment. Established with public money and so far unused they are so big they remind me of production-line treatment for the masses.
In another generation when deep poverty brings with it poverty diseases like TB, scarlet fever, polio, diphtheria etc, and they pass to the privileged also, they’ll learn once again why public health has to be paid for, because the poor can’t shoulder that burden.
Give your far left head a wobble McNUTTY……..You conveniently through your bigotism ignore the fact that it was Blair that introduced selling off parts of the NHS to his ”friends” whilst getting backhanders!! HE was the one that started the privatization process with his PFI
Stop posting THICK IGNORANT BIGOTED posts until you graduate primary school
Left or Right, Tory or Labour both have been guilty of taking a Wrecking Ball to the NHS.
Please you two above, stop fighting the Left, Right nonsense. We need to stick together and fight the main enermy trust you will know who that is!
Will say one thing, if anyone thinks things would have been different with the handling of the present situation with a Labour government in power I fear they would be sadly mistaken. Political Parties do NOT run the Country, surely we have worked that out by now.